


Turn Back The Clock (I Wish I Could)

by Krasimer



Series: Khdo Doo Zrxqgv dqg Qhyhu Edfn Grzq [2]
Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Brothers, Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, Grunkle4Grandpa, I just needed to write something with these two talking happily, My heart breaks for these old men, One Big Happy Family, they're working on it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-04
Updated: 2015-08-04
Packaged: 2018-04-12 23:52:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,235
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4499640
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Krasimer/pseuds/Krasimer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They watched each other awkwardly, each one trying to not be the one to speak first when they ran into each other in the hallway. Ford's jacket was dusted lightly with glitter, a sure sign of him being in the vicinity of Mabel, and there was a smudge of ink on his left hand that probably meant he'd been talking to Dipper as well.</p><p>Stan rolled his eyes, biting his lip to keep from yelling something where the younger twins might hear it, waiting until he had herded his brother into his room, slamming the door shut behind him. "I told you to stay away from them, Ford."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Turn Back The Clock (I Wish I Could)

They watched each other awkwardly, each one trying to not be the one to speak first when they ran into each other in the hallway. Ford's jacket was dusted lightly with glitter, a sure sign of him being in the vicinity of Mabel, and there was a smudge of ink on his left hand that probably meant he'd been talking to Dipper as well.

Stan rolled his eyes, biting his lip to keep from yelling something where the younger twins might hear it, waiting until he had herded his brother into his room, slamming the door shut behind him. "I told you to stay away from them, Ford."

"Yes, well." Ford turned to him, his own face pulled into a frown, his eyes narrowed as he took in the borderline angry expression Stan wore. 

Taking a deep breath to try and keep himself calm, Stan shook his head. "No Ford, not 'well' with a shrug of your shoulders and a simple damn smile." he shook slightly, feeling the eerie echo of the fight that had led to his brother vanishing for thirty years. "The world you were researching is dangerous, you can't let them slide further into it; Dipper's nearly died several times because of the journal you left behind. Mabel's gotten into a few scrapes because of it as well, and I don't want to hold funerals for my niece and nephew!"

Ford's eyes rolled this time, an angry tilt changing his expression into something darker. "Damnit Stan, do you really think I'd let anything happen to the niblings? I'd hurt myself before I'd let anything so much as touch them, and there was once a time when you knew that."

"I'm not even sure what I know anymore, or even what I knew when I was just some dumb kid." Stan grumbled, tilting his fez back to scratch at his forehead. "I knew, when we were little, that there was nothing we wouldn't do for each other, and that you'd do anything for me." he sighed, tapping his hat back into place with a practiced ease, then circled around his brother, aiming towards the side table. "Just like I'd have done anything for you."

"That didn't seem to matter when you broke my-"

Stan's hands tightened on the handle of the drawer, his knuckles turning bloodless and white. "That was over fourty years ago, and it was an accident. I know I screwed up, and I wish I could go back and change it, but there's nothing I can do now and you got most of the life you wanted anyways." he pulled a small journal out of the drawer, then turned back to his brother. "And it would have remained the life you wanted if you had just never called me back into it."

When he moved to go back around Ford, his brother grabbed his wrist, mouth open to say something else.

What happened instead was a jolt, something tugging at his gut and what felt like the knockout punch of an MMA fight to his brain, sending him reeling backwards. "Oh son of a..." he groaned, raising a hand to his head, making a face as he took a deep breath and tried to ignore the soft ringing in his ears. 

The extra finger he now had made him pause.

"Oh no. No no no." looking down provided him with the answer he had been hoping not to get: On the floor, unrolled and flattened out from the shifting state of the house, was the damn carpet the twins had discovered and asked him to get rid of. "Ford, we're gonna have to build up-"

"A static charge and an instance of physical contact, yes." Ford's mannerisms and darting eyes were strange to watch on his own face, even though it was close enough to the man's usual one. There was something about the way he held himself, and it made Stan uncomfortable to see it on his own body. "I created this, I know very well what it does and how to undo it. My immediate question is, why is it in here when I left it in the room downstairs?"

Rubbing at the bridge of his current nose and knocking the glasses slightly askew, Stan shook his head. "Mabel and Dipper fought over the room and asked me to move this thing when Dipper won. In the end, Soos got the room as his new breakroom and Dipper moved back into the room he shares with Mabel."

With a nod, Ford's hand- Stan's hand -traveled up to his shoulder and he frowned as he rotated it slowly. "Your shoulder..."

"Yeah, it locks up sometimes. Muscle damage." Stan sighed, then shook his head again. "Here, let's just switch back before anything else happens. We know how, and this is probably the answer to why they were acting so weird the day they were fighting over the room." he held out a hand to his brother, one foot poised to generate the needed static charge to change back to how it was supposed to be.

Ford didn't take it.

Instead, he slid the hand on his shoulder down, lingering at a few spots on Stan's body, his frown growing deeper each time. "I know what aches and pains from old age feel like versus what aches and pains from injuries feels like, Stanley." he paused, then took a deep breath, something like guilt passing through his eyes. "Your side is knotted up and tensed, and I can't convince the muscles to relax."

"So I got a few scars, so what." Stan could hear the desperation in his voice, which meant that Ford could too. "We all do, now let's switch back before the twins find out I kept this thing."

"Stanley." 

With a muttered version of a word he'd never say in front of the kids, Stan dropped his hand back to his side, tucking it into the pocket of his pants. "...It might be the scar of a gunshot I got hit by back before everything went crazy. I spent over a decade on my own before you called me to your side, and it wasn't all happy and fun."

His brother sat down on the edge of the bed heavily, his eyes wide as he looked at his own face. "You got shot."

"A couple of times, actually." Stan let himself drop onto the bed as well, tugging his journal from Ford's hand, curling his- currently twelve -fingers around it securely. "You try to walk for any amounts of time other than fifteen minutes and you're gonna find that the left ankle wants to do nothin' but hurt for a good long time."

Quietly, Ford leaned down to wrap a hand around the correct ankle, feeling the bones through the pantleg and nodding everytime he felt something wrong. "I- I didn't know what you'd had to deal with."

"Yeah, that was kind of the point." Stan sighed, then prodded a finger into the knee of the right leg that was usually his. "There's also some weirdness here, I twisted it pretty badly when I was trying to run away from a raid back in...Oh man, I think it was eighty-one? That sounds right." he took a deep breath, inhaling through his nose and breathing out slowly through his mouth. "I got kind of in a bad place, and that's all of that story you're getting out of me on the subject."

They sat there in silence for a while, occasionally bringing up some ache or scar that they could tell was somewhere on the body they currently wore. Where Stan wouldn't talk about the ten years he had spent away from his brother, Ford wouldn't talk about the thirty years in the portal.

"What's the importance of that journal anyways?" Ford finally asked, his left hand wrapped around his shoulder blade once more, fingers tracing over the brand he'd given his brother. 

Stan grumbled quietly, then held it up, not even pretending that he was going to open it. "It's a journal I started when...When I lost you. I wrote down every clue, obsessed over where the next thing I needed might be. I scribbled out the bullshit my brain gave me in the form of dreams, hoping that maybe that might help. I dunno, it seems stupid now but I thought that maybe if you would be able to contact me at all, it'd be that way." 

"...That's not stupid." Ford muttered, eyes fixed on where his fingertips were pressed together. "You never actually were, Lee. Not even when you couldn't understand math the same way as I did."

"Yeah I was." Stan nudged his brother's shoulder, shaking his head and plastering on a smile that was all crooked angles and misery pretending to be something else. "I wasn't the poindexter brainiac, and I knew I was never gonna be. That was all you."

"Stanley."

Unlike before, it was said with some fondness, Ford's borrowed eyebrows angled in such a way as to be unsettlingly close to contrite. 

"You may not have brought home the same grades as I did," Ford shook his head and traced the fingers of his right hand over the knee on the same side, as if trying to look anywhere but at his brother. "But you brought me back. I know very well how difficult that portal is to operate when you have to start from scratch. I cannot imagine having to try to operate and begin anew while also teaching yourself the methods and theories behind it." he finally looked up, his eyes full of guilt. "You taught yourself physics and math and all of what was needed simply so that you could bring me back."

"I already said that I'd do anything for you, you don't have to get all blubbery over it." Stan looked away, looked down, looked anywhere but at his twin.

Ford laughed, just once, then stuck a foot out and rubbed it along the troublesome carpet before tapping his knuckles against his brother's face. When they were back in the correct bodies, Ford stood up and settled the journal back into Stan's hands, then kneeled down to roll up the carpet and shove it under the bed. "I missed you." he said simply when he was finished, his hands curling into fists on his knees. "And I spent three decades wishing that I had just- Just calmed down a little, used the rational thought processes I know I have."

"...I regretted fighting with you the moment I saw you floating." Stan swallowed hard, looking at his brother with a sideways glance, as if he could avoid the conversation by refusing to look at him straight on. "Thirty seconds of fighting led to thirty years of me failing all over again."

His brother shook his head but didn't say anything, his face pulled into a strange expression. "I missed you before I went through the portal. If I'd known what your life was like, I probably would have tracked you down earlier." he sighed, one hand buried in his hair as he settled back down on the edge of the bed. "There's a couple of things we need to talk about, Stan."

"Like what?" Stan clutched his journal to his chest, rubbing the joint of his thumb over it so hard that it ached. "Like the fact that being in your body was nothing but pain? What exactly happened on the other side of the portal?"

"That's not what we need to talk about." 

"Then what is?"

He clenched his hand hard enough that some of the knuckles cracked and popped, then flexed it out. "How about the fact that Shermy is forty-five, Stan. I'm not an idiot, I can do the math. Either there were two generations of teenage pregnancies or you're lying about the grandparent of those children." He looked back up at his twin, heaving a sigh. "And Mabel looks like Carla McCorkle, except with the lighter coloring your genetics would have brought to the whole affair."

Stan sighed and shook his head this time, focusing on the book he held and the bedspread beneath him. "Shermy adopted my son when he was eighteen and my son was four or five. The kids don't know."

With that information hanging in the air between them, Stan closed his eyes and hunched over his lap, curled around the book he held. He nearly jumped out of his skin when an arm wrapped around his shoulders, pulled him against Ford's side and his brother's chin pressed into his shoulder a few seconds later. "I advise you to tell them, but I'll keep your secret for you for now." Ford muttered. "But right now I am going to follow my niece's advice and 'hug it out'."

"It's kind of funny, but we came in here and we would have fought almost the same as we did thirty years ago if the damn rug hadn't been on the floor." Stan turned so that he could wrap an arm around his brother. 

Ford laughed, an actual laugh that sounded raspy from disuse. "Sometimes you need to switch points of view to understand what's going on with the other side of things."

They sat there for a while, each of them trying to figure out what to do next.

**Author's Note:**

> I didn't need another fandom to write for, I really didn't.


End file.
